Borsoi, Giulio

Zumtobel Group, Researcher

Borsoi, Giulio

Zumtobel Group, Researcher

Biography

Giulio Borsoigraduated in telecommunication engineering at the University of Padova obtaining his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in 2005 and 2008 respectively. Right after the University he joined Tridonic and continued working on LED reliability tests. From 2009 to 2013 he contributed to several projects related to LED thermal management and multi-channel light sources with Kompetenzzentrum Licht. In 2013 he joined the Global Technology team of Tridonic and he is now part of the Research & Pre-Development team of Zumtobel Group, dealing with Integrated Light Engines, IoT and connected lighting topics.

How the OpenAIS Group Communication Allows Secure and Low Latency Interoperable IoT Based Lighting Controls Designs

One of the main challenges in IP based lighting controls is the challenge to match the performance of simple wired systems like 1..10V or DALI, and in parallel provide all the benefits that Internet-to-the-node promise.

The main reason is given by the different nature of Internet-based communication and those simple systems:

Simple systems: only one signal source delivers the signal always to all participants in parallel.

IP based systems: A port is opened, a connection is used to establish a session with a server, data are exchanged, session is closed, next session is established etc.

With ultra-fast Gigabit wired LAN infrastructure some hundred light points may be addressed serially without conflicting to the low latency requirements typical for lighting, but whenever restricted bandwidth or non-zero media access timing is applied, as seen in almost every RF communication, the time delay between the first and the last light point addressed the OpenAIS team added a secure group communication to the standard internet interaction to cope with these requirements. (See www.openais.eu/en/results for detailed information) We replace the session – oriented communication (TCP) with a datagram – oriented communication (UDP) and use CoAP instead of HTTP. (CoAP uses numbers instead of the words used in the http:// “address line” to save some bandwidth and to reduce the parsing effort.) To ensure high security standards the content of the messages is encrypted. The only open information of messages is the “Key-ID” that points to the (pre-negotiated) key that is used to decrypt the message. To overcome the one-after-one communication we are using the IPv6 Multicast addresses to talk to a set of nodes in parallel. (In the RF domain all devices are able to pick up all other communication in their physical reach, but this is usually not used for Internet transported data: Using multicast addresses this gets enabled.)

Additional measures need to be taken: A receiving device that is addressed by a multicast message may have more than one light point embedded, and so the message needs to be routed to the correct recipients, that are members of this “group”. To achieve this we do use group-ID’s (“Application Group ID”) that tell the device internal routing mechanisms where the message belongs to.) This ends up in being able to “talk to a group” via the Internet just like we were used to “talk to a group” in DALI or KNX networks. Being able to use the Internet Methods in group communication lead to some structural differences in the communication objects: The restrictions that formed the logical base for the DALI (and the KNX) definitions have less or no weight in this field, but other restrictions (e.g. Data-formats and object structures etc.) apply to allow the use of standard tools in the IP environment. Also “interoperability” is a completely different story: The already fully standardized internet communication environment already provides most of what is hard work e.g. with DALI 2, only a “small common language set” for the group communication is needed. Outside group communication the interoperability is very much eased, as a commissioning tool may well talk to each device in a different “language”, as long a s the language plug-ins are provided by the manufacturers: There is NO NEED to unify the languages used for commissioning and parametrization.

Conclusion: The OpenAIS Consortium has in a substantial effort, partly financed by the H2020 program of the EU, defined a group communication stat allows to use standard IP based networking systems for (future) Lighting Controls.